


Distorted

by Paradise_Seeker



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Borrowed grace, Demon Dean Winchester, Gen, Trueform Castiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 06:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3436601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paradise_Seeker/pseuds/Paradise_Seeker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He always knew Castiel was living on borrowed grace. He always knew. But now he can <i>see</i>, and it's marvellous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distorted

He always knew Castiel was living on borrowed grace. He always knew that his own grace had been stolen by Metatron for that damned spell, that, in order to keep his powers, he had to consume the grace of other angels. He always knew. But now he can _see_ , and it's marvellous.

Grace is like an angel's soul, Dean had surmised as much. Anna had called it pure creation and he had had a difficult time understanding when Castiel had told him he had stolen grace from another angel. He had thought it was impossible. Had thought that each angel's grace was unique, irreplaceable. Poison, even, like a foreign body, a rejected limb, a parasite.

He was not wrong.

There is no Chrysler building height. No violent, brutal, _blinding_ light ready to burn his eyes and his tainted soul. It is not smoke either, nor a flow of gentle brightness. Not a wavelength of celestial intent, nor a ball of luminescence. No, it's broken wings, clumps of flesh falling down to earth in quickly evaporating silvery wisps, dead eyes and gaping holes.

It's heads, grotesque and inhuman, full of teeth and spikes and horns, hanging like dead weight, all attached to what a generous person might call a neck but looked more like a stunted trunk. They look like an eagle, a lion, a bull, an alligator, a monkey, even a few species he cannot name. But the faces are all wrong, all _dead_. There is no light in those lifeless eyes, no strength in the lax muscles. The jaws are hanging open in a mockery of a laugh or maybe a scream; mouths wide open in agony, tongues lolling out of beaks and muzzles, pale and swollen.

It's blobs of blue-white meat or fat or cells, he doesn't know, translucent and sickly looking, touches of angry red marring it, like gaping wounds, like tumours. One, in the centre, seems to glow a bit brighter, beating a steady pulse. He likes to imagine it as a heart.

It's dark grey bones, twisted and angry, full of knots and fractures, intertwined together in an uncoordinated mess, in a jungle of cartilage, a skeleton made labyrinth.

It's limbs longer than others or shorter, bigger, bent, and limp, claws and paws, scales and tails, all mismatched, all distorted. It's worse than Frankenstein's monster and more graceful, in a way.

It's practically the absence of flesh on those bones and where there is flesh, it seems like it has been eaten by worms, burned by acid, clawed away by hungry monsters. The corpse is torn apart, but it is still moving, still animated, its rhythm slow and jerky, like it's too hard to move all these pieces together at once, too hard to make them obey all together at once.

It's a cluster of bodies, a heap of cadavers, a pile of dead angels all held together by a single want, a single entity, personified by the only head whose eyes are open, blue, blue, so blue.

Should he be surprised that the head is basically faceless, a blank mask with no hair, no nose, no mouth, no ears, no nothing? There are only eyes, full of sorrow and guilt and blue, so blue it almost hurts to look at them. But he looks, oh, he looks.

Above all, there are the wings. Or, more accurately, the structure of wings; ethereal feathers clinging desperately to hollowed bones, black and devoured by sin. They arch high in the air, but they look fragile, frail, like a wind too strong might break those weak ulnae, humeruses and radiuses. They try to intimidate, to shield, but there is nothing left on them, no razor-sharp feathers, no hard steel bones, nothing that can save the angel from him.

He watches this one face, this one imperturbable face in a sea of inert and decaying visages. He wonders what it feels like to be like this, a mound of corpses not his own but attached to him anyway, in some way part of him. He wonders what Castiel's unique grace would look like, if the blank mask was the only way for the angel to keep his own identity, to not lose himself in the hundreds of brothers and sisters he has killed to survive.

He wonders what his true form looked like when he was infested with Leviathans. When he was filled with human souls to the brim, to the point of explosion.

He wonders what it would look like, once he took possession of his body. Would his black smoke tangle itself with the silvery blue-white mess? Would it consume that beating blue orb, that maybe-heart? Would it blacken the blue, so blue eyes?

He grins and opens his mouth wide. The ethereal feathers tremble and the gleaming silver sword shakes in the unsteady grip. The blue, so blue eyes, plead with him, beg him. _Please, please, please, don't do this._

He won't let Cas be alone like this. Be alone with all these feeble angel corpses, alone to drag that crumbling carcass wherever he goes.

He opens his mouth and breathes gently, whispers nonsensical words of reassurance, of love, of praise. He lets his tainted soul slip past his lips and run over what once was Jimmy Novak's tongue.

"You'll never be alone, I promise."

**Author's Note:**

> I might have a thing for demon Dean. And I might be very dissatisfied with season 10 so far. Who can blame me?
> 
> English is not my mother tongue, feel free to point out any mistake you see.


End file.
